Pakistan 'failing' its missing suspects

Pakistan's government has failed to push for information on hundreds of its citizens who went missing after the country joined the US-led "war on terror", according to Amnesty International.

The human rights group has accused the government of failing to take firm steps to find those who have being missing for up to seven years after being seized by the country's intelligence agencies and police. These apparent terror suspects have never been charged, are thought to have been subject to torture and moved between secret detention centres, so that they become impossible to trace.

Amnesty said the US and Britain had "benefited from this activity", which began under President Pervez Musharraf. It called for lists of the missing people to be compiled, and detainees moved into official prisons and processed through the courts. "This is an easy and achievable step forward that would signal a very strong break with the policies of the government of Musharraf," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty's Asia Pacific director. "It really is a non-political issue and the government should start showing some concrete results."

A Commons foreign affairs committee report called on the UK government to investigate claims by seven British nationals that they were mistreated by Pakistani intelligence officers. Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister, told the committee the government "absolutely deny" allegations it had outsourced torture to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

To critics of Pakistan's coalition government, which is led by the Pakistan People's party, the lack of progress on missing persons is symptomatic of a broader malaise, which has seen the policies and some personnel of the Musharraf era continue into the new democratic dispensation.

Amnesty said that until the issue of the judges sacked by Musharraf in November, when he imposed six weeks of emergency rule, was resolved, there was little hope of progress on the missing persons.

Those judges, led by the deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, had demanded that the administration produce the missing in court, a tactic that led to the recovery of dozens of people, some of whom were in such a poor state of health that they had to be brought in on a stretcher.

Yesterday Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for the Pakistan People's party, said: "The missing persons issue is high on the agenda. In fact when I called on the prime minister a few days ago ... he mentioned this issue as well."

Babar added that the interior ministry has been "tasked to call a meeting of the [intelligence] agencies and sort it out".

Amina Janjua, whose husband Masood disappeared three years ago and has campaigned to recover the missing, has met the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and interior ministry officials. "[The government] talk a lot, but that is not enough," she said.